FOOLCiRCLE

Just finished the BYO Magazine October issue today on lunch. It was a quick and fun read, but nothing that shook the homebrewing community to its knees.

In the “Tips from the Pros” section Andy Tveekrem from Dogfish Head speaks about dry hopping with a Randall. It really wasn’t anything new, but towards the end he mentions they are working on a Randall version 2.0 which started as a senior engineering project with a group of Bucknell University students – whoa! I believe I saw said prototype at the DFH Bocce Tournament, not in use or on display, but sitting next to a pile of tools and hoses. It looks more pneumatic, like the beer will be more forced through the Randall versus pushed. They also had it all doctored up to look like a green dogfish with a clear body so you could see the hops, pretty neat.

Per usual I was delighted by Jamil Z.’s “Style Profile” on Scottish Ales. This article did two main things for me. One, I wish I had ordered ingredients to brew my MacRae Scottish Ale for this fall, and two it basically confirmed that I will buy Jamil’s book, Brewing Classic Styles, when it come out. After Jamil’s article there were two big articles on partial mashes and extract batches. I read both of them and they were interesting, possibly pretty useful for some brewers, but to me I was waiting to see what was next. Plus Chris Colby, the aurthor for the partial mashes, writes as if he gets paid by the word, boring.

After that was a funny little article called “BSI: Brew Scene Investigation” by John Palmer, a good beer author. The article itself I thought was kind of lame in it’s explanation and follow through, but the way it was written, very Dragnetish, was hilarious. It was basically a spoof off of most cop-buddy scenarios thrown into a homebrew situation and what came of it all. Toward the end of the magazine was an article that I enjoyed but felt was lacking any meat called “The Spirit of Belgium”. This article asked only four questions to seven of the American industries craft Belgian style beer makers. Good idea, but often there was too much overlap in the answers, even throughout different questions, which made the article feel a little fluffy. Some of the people interviewed were: Tomme Arthur from Lost Abbey, Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River, and Rob Tod from Allagash. The rest of the magazine which included articles on specialty grains and hop utilization left me wanting more. They did a great job reiterating what I already know but I wanted to learn something new, oh well, not this time.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 8:22 am and is filed under Magazines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.